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29 octubre In Agenda, BiodiversiNOTICIAS by Coordinación Editorial

Nature ecology & evolution, November

Volume 4 Issue 11, November 2020

Volume 4 Issue 11

Realistic experiments

A comparison of the plant communities in two long-term grassland experiments (The BioDIV Experiment, Cedar Creek, Minnesota, United States — see picture — and the Jena Experiment, Jena, Germany) to those of related real-world sites shows that accounting for unrealistic experimental communities does not substantially change the conclusions commonly drawn from biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments.

See Jochum et al.

Image: Forest Isbell. Cover Design: Lauren Heslop.

Editorial

    Editorial | 28 October 2020

    A wealth of potential exists for citizen science to contribute to major ecological and societal challenges. We can all play a part by contributing to these projects, and encouraging our networks to do so too.

Correspondence

Comment & Opinion

    Comment | 18 August 2020

    Efforts by conservation scientists to draw public attention to the biodiversity crisis are increasingly met with denialist rhetoric. We summarize some of the methods used by denialists to undermine scientific evidence on biodiversity loss, and outline pathways forward for the scientific community to counter misinformation.

    • Alexander C. Lees
    • Simon Attwood
    •  & Ben Phalan

    Comment | 01 September 2020

    Recent engineered expansions of the Panama and Suez canals have accelerated the introduction of non-native marine fishes and other organisms between their adjacent waters. Measures to prevent further invasions through canals should be incorporated into global shipping policies, as well as through local efforts.

    • Gustavo A. Castellanos-Galindo
    • D. Ross Robertson
    •  & Mark E. Torchin

News & Views

    News & Views | 07 September 2020

    The discovery of Minjinia turgenensis, a Palaeozoic stem-group jawed vertebrate with endochondral bone — a character long regarded as exclusive for bony fish and land vertebrates — changes our perception of bone formation evolution. It may also provide the first evidence for endochondral bone loss in cartilaginous fishes.

    • Valéria Vaškaninová

    News & Views | 17 August 2020

    New evidence from over 4,600 studies calls into question the universal application of critical threshold values, or tipping points, along gradients of environmental stress. Identifying never-to-exceed environmental targets may prove elusive for environmental policy and management.

    • Joan Dudney
    •  & Katharine N. Suding

Reviews

    Perspective | 17 August 2020

    There is an urgent need to ensure that marine ecosystems are able to support biodiversity and the services they sustain in the face of rapid global change. Here, the authors argue that a holistic approach of integrated ocean management can ensure a sustainable and resilient ocean economy.

    • Jan-Gunnar Winther
    • Minhan Dai
    •  & Sandra Whitehouse

    Review Article | 14 September 2020

    Ecological management strategies — from conservation to fisheries — require ecosystem-level thinking. This Review describes the main types of ecosystem model, how to select an appropriate model for a given application, and how to manage complexity and uncertainty.

    • William L. Geary
    • Michael Bode
    •  & Euan G. Ritchie

Research

    Brief Communication | 24 August 2020

    An analysis of the overlap between tropical forest restoration, human populations, development and national policies for community forest ownership shows that 294.5 million people live within forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South.

    • J. T. Erbaugh
    • N. Pradhan
    •  & A. Chhatre

    Article | 07 September 2020

    Minjinia turgenensis, an Early Devonian fish, preserves anatomical details consistent with it being a stem gnathostome, but also endochondral bone similar to that of osteichthyans. These findings suggest that endochondral bone is an ancestral condition subsequently lost in chondrichthyans.

    • Martin D. Brazeau
    • Sam Giles
    •  & Marco Castiello

    Article | 24 August 2020

    By comparing data from real-world grassland communities with data from two of the longest-running grassland biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments, the authors show that conclusions derived from experimental systems are robust to the removal of unrealistic experimental communities.

    • Malte Jochum
    • Markus Fischer
    •  & Peter Manning

    Article | 24 August 2020

    A scale-independent theory of habitat complexity based on three key surface descriptors explains substantial variation in coral reef biodiversity.

    • Damaris Torres-Pulliza
    • Maria A. Dornelas
    •  & Joshua S. Madin

    Article | 17 August 2020

    The utility of the threshold paradigm, such that relatively small perturbations drive abrupt ecosystem changes, is challenged by a synthesis of 36 meta-analyses, which detected few signatures of thresholds from over 4,600 global change impacts on natural ecological communities.

    • Helmut Hillebrand
    • Ian Donohue
    •  & Jan A. Freund

    Article | 31 August 2020

    By combining an analysis of common garden and field experiments, together with a survey of wild hosts, the authors show that prior infection by a plant fungal parasite increases susceptibility to infection by other strains and that this priming effect influences the assembly of the parasite community.

    • Fletcher W. Halliday
    • Rachel M. Penczykowski
    •  & Anna-Liisa Laine

    Article | 31 August 2020

    Using a food systems approach, the authors show that scientifically guided insect biological control mitigated 43 pest targets between 1918 and 2018 in the Asia–Pacific region, allowing for yield-loss recoveries of up to 73–100% in non-rice critical crops, with strong impacts on rural economies.

    • Kris A. G. Wyckhuys
    • Yanhui Lu
    •  & Michael J. Furlong

    Article | 31 August 2020

    Examining skeletal traits within a time-calibrated phylogeny, the authors find that ocean geochemistry (particularly aragonite–calcite seas) has driven patterns of morphological evolution in anthozoans (corals, sea anemones) over time.

    • Andrea M. Quattrini
    • Estefanía Rodríguez
    •  & Catherine S. McFadden

    Article | 31 August 2020

    Experimental evolution shows that epimutations driven by small silencing RNAs in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans arise rapidly but most have limited stability, suggesting that these epimutations might contribute to evolutionary processes over a short timescale.

    • Toni Beltran
    • Vahid Shahrezaei
    •  & Peter Sarkies

    Article | 24 August 2020

    The authors infer that pelvic skeleton reduction in a fossil sequence of the Miocene stickleback fish, Gasterosteus doryssus, proceeds through the same gene of large effect and a similar suite of genes of small effect as in a closely related extant species, Gasterosteus aculeatus.

    • Yoel E. Stuart
    • Matthew P. Travis
    •  & Michael A. Bell

    Article | 24 August 2020

    This study reports the depletion of young Neandertal and Denisovan introgressed SNPs from gene regulatory enhancers in modern human genomes, as well as an association of enhancer pleiotropy with both the magnitude of archaic SNP depletion and the degree of intolerance to new mutations.

    • Natalie Telis
    • Robin Aguilar
    •  & Kelley Harris

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